Books Published by Staff in 2014

Books Published in 2014

Treaty conflicts are not merely the contingent or inadvertent by-products of the increasing juridification of international relations. In several instances, States have deliberately created treaty conflicts in order to catalyse changes in multilateral regimes. Surabhi Ranganathan uses such conflicts as context to explore the role of international law, in legal thought and practice. Her examinations of the International Law Commission's work on treaties and of various scholars' proposals on institutional action, offer a fresh view of 'mainstream' legal thought. They locate in a variety of writings a common faith in international legal discourse, built on liberal and constructivist assumptions. Ranganathan's three rich studies of treaty conflict, relating to the areas of seabed mining, the International Criminal Court, and nuclear governance, furnish a textured account of the specific forms and practices that constitute such a legal discourse and permit a grounded understanding of the interactions that shape international law.

This book examines the role of criminal law in the enforcement of immigration controls over the last two decades in Britain. The criminalization of immigration status has historically served functions of exclusion and control against those who defy the state’s powers over its territory and population. In the last two decades, the powers to exclude and punish have been enhanced by the expansion of the catalogue of immigration offences and their more systematic enforcement.

This book is the first in-depth analysis on criminal offences in Britain, and presents original empirical material about the use of criminal powers against suspected immigration wrongdoers. Based on interviews with practitioners and staff at the UK Border Agency and data from court cases involving immigration defendants, it examines prosecution decision making and the proceedings before the criminal justice system. Crimes of Mobility critically analyses the criminalization of immigration status and, more generally, the functions of the criminal law in immigration enforcement, from a legal and normative perspective.

It will be of interest to academics and research students working on criminology, criminal law, criminal justice, socio-legal studies, migration and refugee studies, and human rights, as well as criminal law and immigration practitioners.

Featuring an original introduction by the editors, this important collection of essays explores the main issues surrounding the regulation of the environment. The expert contributors illustrate that regulating the environment in the UK is conceptually complex, involves a diverse range of institutions, techniques and methodologies and crosses geographical and national boundaries. In the USA it is more formalised, juridical, adversarial and formally dependent upon legal rules. The articles highlight the fact that despite differences in the UK and the USA's regulatory styles, environmental regulation today has much in common with both traditions.

Few concerns preoccupy contemporary progressive thought as much as the issue of how to achieve a sustainable human society. The problems impeding this goal include those of how to arrest induced global environmental change (GEC), persistent disagreements about the contribution of economic activities to GEC and further differences in views on how these activities can be reformed in order to reduce the rate of change and thus to mitigate threats to much life on Earth.

A tribute to the continuing inspiration of James Boyd White’s work on law.

In 2013, an international group of jurists gathered in London to mark the 40th anniversary of the publication of James Boyd White’s The Legal Imagination, the book that is widely credited with instigating and inspiring the modern “law and literature” and “law and humanities” movements in university teaching and research. The authors of each of the twelve essays in this collection offer a personal reflection on teaching, researching, and practicing law in the light of White’s invitation to reimagine the law and our own relationship with it.

This book maps out, from a variety of theoretical standpoints, the challenges generated by European integration and EU citizenship for community membership, belonging and polity-making beyond the state. It does so by focusing on three main issues of relevance for how EU citizenship has developed and its capacity to challenge state sovereignty and authority as the main loci of creating and delivering rights and protection. First, it looks at the relationship between citizenship of the Union and European identity and assesses how immigration and access to nationality in the Member States impact on the development of a common European identity. Secondly, it discusses how the idea of solidarity interacts with the boundaries of EU citizenship as constructed by the entitlement and capacity of mobile citizens to enjoy equality and social rights as EU citizens. Thirdly, the book engages with issues of EU citizenship and equality as the building blocks of the EU project. By engaging with these themes, this volume provides a topical and comprehensive account of the present and future development of Union citizenship and studies the collisions between the realisation of its constructive potential and Member State autonomy.

An engaging introduction to some of the more advanced concepts in Company Law and corporate governance, providing a cutting edge for students who are looking to gain additional insights with which to excel. Readers are introduced to the many debates surrounding each core area and presented with the key tensions and questions underlying each topic.

Today, almost half of all children are born outside marriage, with cohabiting relationships accounting for the majority of such births. But what was the situation in earlier centuries? Bringing together leading historians, demographers and lawyers, this interdisciplinary collection examines the changing context of non-marital child-bearing in England and Wales since 1600. Drawing on Private Acts of Parliament, ecclesiastical court records, reported cases, sessions files, coronial records, poor law records, petitions to the London Foundling Hospital, the registers of the London Bridewell, the records of charitable institutions, surveys and modern demographic data, it not only shows the relative rarity of cohabitation in earlier periods but also discovers the nature of individual relationships. It also explores how differences in the extent of both non-marital child-bearing and cohabitation emerge depending on definition, source material, interpretation and location, building up a more nuanced picture of past practices.

Catherine Exley was born in Leeds in 1779. Aged thirty, she boarded a ship and sailed for Portugal. Her memoir of the years she spent following the 34th Regiment is unique, the only first-hand account of the Peninsular War by the wife of a common British soldier. Published shortly after her death as a booklet which has since been lost, Catherine’s Diary survived in a local newspaper of 1923 to be rediscovered by her great-great-great-grandson. It is difficult today to comprehend the hardships Catherine endured: of her twelve children, three died as infants while with her on the march; her clothes, ‘covered with filth and vermin’, often went unchanged for weeks at a time, and she herself more than once almost died from illness and starvation; shocked at the mutilation inflicted by muskets and cannons, she still had the composure to manhandle blackened corpses upon a battlefield in search of her missing husband when hardened soldiers could no longer stomach the task. Her diary is reproduced here along with chapters which bear upon Catherine’s experiences in Spain and Portugal, and which put her life and writings in their social context.

Sixty years on from the signing of the Refugee Convention, forced migration and refugee movements continue to raise global concerns for hosting states and regions, for countries of origin, for humanitarian organisations on the ground, and, of course, for the refugee. This edited volume is framed around two themes which go to the core of contemporary ‘refugeehood’: protection and identity. It analyses how the issue of refugee identity is shaped by and responds to the legal regime of refugee protection in contemporary times.

Social Movements, Law and the Politics of Land Reform investigates how rural social movements are struggling for land reform against the background of ambitious but unfulfilled constitutional promises evident in much of the developing world. Taking Brazil as an example, it unpicks the complex reasons behind the remarkably consistent failures of its constitution and law enforcement mechanisms to deliver social justice. Using detailed empirical evidence and focusing upon the relationship between rural social struggles and the state, the book develops a threefold argument: first, the inescapable presence of power relations in all aspects of the production and reproduction of law; secondly their dominant impact on socio-legal outcomes; and finally the essential and positive role played by social movements in redressing those power imbalances and realising law’s progressive potentialities.

The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) reshaped the debates about slavery and freedom throughout the Atlantic world, accelerated the abolitionist movement, precipitated rebellions in neighboring territories, and intensified both repression and antislavery sentiment. The story of the birth of the world’s first independent black republic has since held an iconic fascination for a diverse array of writers, artists, and intellectuals throughout the Atlantic diaspora. Examining twentieth-century responses to the Haitian Revolution, Philip Kaisary offers a profound new reading of the representation of the Revolution by radicals and conservatives alike in primary texts that span English, French, and Spanish languages and that include poetry, drama, history, biography, fiction, and opera.